The road to space isn’t always a straight line. Sometimes, the itinerary for a career in the space industry begins with years of experience in other tech fields. And sometimes, it starts at an espresso stand.
“I actually started as a barista at SpaceX, and I somehow got recruited to go build Starlink satellites,” Kayla VanderPutten, a technical recruiter at Anduril Industries, said Monday at a downtown Seattle Tech Week session focusing on the intersection of space and technology. “I don’t know why they let me do that, but I was there for the first 500 satellites before I transitioned into recruiting.”
Over the course of 25 years, Joydeep Hazra’s career path took him through a series of jobs in telecommunications and network engineering, including management positions at Nokia, Mavenir and TRIDENTX. Now he’s the manager of a federally funded program focusing on electric vehicles at South Seattle College — and he’s getting involved in aerospace as well.
